September WNUG User Group Meeting….

Our monthly User Group meeting will be held at the Lincoln Square Center in Bellevue, across from the Bellevue Square Mall at 6:00pm. The meeting will be held in Room 15104, (15th floor, room 104) at the Microsoft’s office in Lincoln Square Center.

Due to the security requirements, non-Microsoft employees must be escorted to the building by a Microsoft employee. We will have a sign on the 2nd floor elevator with instructions and/or contact phone number.

Our guest speaker in September will be Steve Schwartz. The topic of his presentation is "Roadmap to the Cloud for Messaging, Collaboration, and Communications."

Steve is one of the leading industry experts in the cloud technologies. He started his cloud services business way before most of us ever heard the term “cloud computing”, over a decade ago. He is considered a pioneer in the Hosted Exchange business, having worked with Microsoft in 1999 on the very first project to document how to deliver Hosted Exchange 2000. In 2006, Steve started Chinook Communications to provide hosted Messaging, Collaboration, and Communications services utilizing the Microsoft cloud services platform.

In his presentation Steve will discuss the typical pain points companies are faced within IT and Telecommunications. These include issues around security, disaster recovery, reliability, leveraging new technology, and reducing costs. The session will then detail how leveraging the cloud for messaging, collaboration, and communications on a Microsoft platform can help address some of these common issues. Finally, the session will present a common roadmap for how to migrate to the cloud in a phased approach that minimizes user disruption. An approach that gradually phases in changes while having an immediate positive impact on the business by providing more effective communications at reduced costs.